Segni evidenti, teoria e testimonianza nelle narrazioni di autopsie del Rinascimento
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Abstract
Relatively numerous accounts of autopsies survive from the fifteenth to the early seventeenth centuries. Each of these brief narratives reports specific historical events and empirical observations relating to an individual case; autopsy narratives therefore seem a potentially useful category of medical literature to examine in relation to concepts of fact or event. This paper investigates some characteristics of these accounts, with particular attention to their relation to other forms of descriptive writing in medicine, the presence or absence of overt theoretical explanation, the role of expert testimony, the degree of confidence reposed in autopsy as a source of medical information, and the basis of that confidence.